Posted
on Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 4:00 AM

After her mom remarries, Bella Swan (Stewart) has to move in with her dad — all the way across country! Worse, relocating means a new high school, and, for a girl like Bella, a vegetarian who’d rather hang out in an antique bookstore than go dress shopping, life in small-town Washington state is, like, godawful. The editor of the school paper offers to write a feature celebrating her arrival, a bunch of polite, cool-seeming guys ask her to prom within seconds of meeting her, and the girls laugh at her jokes and ask her for pointers on being more awesome. But life still sucks, because sullen Übermensch Edward Cullen (Pattinson), the super-hunkiest boy in school, seems physically nauseated when she’s assigned as his lab partner.

She’s barely had time to have a pouty internal monologue about it, though, before Edward’s had a violent bipolar shift, and starts awkwardly asking her about her feelings. It’s impossible to know for sure what’s going on inside Edward’s head because Pattinson is a horrible, horrible actor, delivering his lines with a Keanu Reeves-esque look of panicked confusion, like a moose that’s just woken up in a space shuttle. There’s no mistaking it when Bella discovers he’s a vampire, though — the eternally 17 Edward loses his shit “I’ve been unable to buy cigarettes or pornography for more than a century” style. He follows her around during the day and sneaks into her room at night to watch her sleep. After rescuing her from a group of over-aggressive assbags, Edward wants to go back and rip their heads off, saying she should have “heard what those lowlifes were thinking.” Yikes. Travis Bickle much, Eddie?

Even so, he’s still a blood-sucking dreamboat. In direct sunlight, he shimmers like he’s slathered in glitter makeup, and he’s so charming he can put a romantic spin on his insatiable hunger for her blood. He’s an addict, he says, and she’s his “own personal brand of heroin.” Then he gives her a piggy-back ride and takes her to meet his family. I wish I could tell you if he also buys her the pony she always wanted, but the rest of the film is a blur. After that heroin line, my tear ducts began leaking pure estrogen.